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sciencehabit writes "If carrion flies have one enviable talent, it's finding animal carcasses in the wilderness, something they surpass even the most systematic and intrepid field biologists at doing. Now, researchers may be able to capitalize on the insects' gruesome gift to survey biodiversity. Capture the flies, a new study shows, and DNA from their last meals will tell you which animals live in the area. In addition to scanning an area's biodiversity, the technique has the potential to reveal species that are new to science."

Some people consider them plants for various reasons, but they differ from plants in that they lack the green chlorophyll that plants use to manufacture their own food and energy. For this reason they ar

Possibly but at this point skepticism around Bigfoot is so high that DNA taken from a sample that matches no known species does not qualify as credible evidence. Such DNA has been found before, is consistent with what one would expect Bigfoots DNA to look like and the results are labeled inconclusive and dismissed as contamination by skeptics.

At this point nothing short of catching a live specimen will suffice. And even that would likely only be enough to kick off years of testing and analysis before there

You'd think we would have a roadkill by now if they existed. Instead you have dodgy people pushing dodgy claims using the same scam style approaches with blair-witch videos. Appreciate you keeping an open mind but at some point it has to be put up or shut up. That time passed a long time ago.

Why? A reclusive and intelligent species with a low population in a massive mostly unpopulated forest. I don't see any particular reason there should be. There is DNA and video. Hell we didn't have video of a giant squid until recently.

There are very DODGY videos done by very DODGY people. There was a hunter who said he shot one but didnt bring back the sample. There were people who claimed to have stuff but rather than rushing to share it out they did the usual dodgy thing and said that the guvmint and others were trying to suppress the info and so they would have it privately tested by unknown firms. DODGY DODGY DODGY. And playing you all for fools as you lap it up. Put up or shut up.

It just takes one sample to prove it all. Don't these things die? Don't they cross the road?

google "dead mountain gorillas" and you will see lots of images. Mountain Gorillas are rare yet lots of pictures. Now do the same for "dead bigfoots" and you will see fakes. Despite stories from around the world about bigfoot/yeti/sasquatch.

Just find one and you can happily laugh in our face. Instead we get obviously fake videos and gullible people like you.

First of all I listed three and you just listed two although you gave a quote of something one of them said about one expedition he went on because he had integrity which only lends credibility to his other work. Then you launched into an Ad Hominem attack on the other. You do know it is a logical fallacy to discount a message by attacking the messenger rather than the content? I note you didn't have

I wonder if this technique could be used with mosquitoes to find people. I.e. remember them verifying Bin Laden's location using DNA collected from a fake inoculation campaign(I think that was it). Instead this wouldn't require direct contact with someone, but instead capturing local mosquitoes.

Could have both nefarious and benevolent applications.

Only thing is mosquitoes don't travel very far. Which is bad in that you have to travel around and collect mosquitoes from lots of areas, and good in that when you find a match you have a pretty good idea how close you are.

I wonder if this technique could be used with mosquitoes to find people. I.e. remember them verifying Bin Laden's location using DNA collected from a fake inoculation campaign

if not yet, it probably won't be long.

The taxonomists (and botanists, zoologists etc) have only recently been able to discover new species by sequencing the DNA. Previously, it took laborious searching and comparison of samples -- especially difficult with insects -- and that's not so accurate. Now, you can lay out some sticky paper and feed whatever sticks through a machine.

No. That's why sequencing DNA that doesn't match to any known species would reveal a previously unknown species. Based on sequence homology scientists could probably then figure out the genus of the new species, since the majority of the DNA would be similar.

It sounds very promising but obtaining biodiversity profiles from flies guts is no easy tasks. When you collect samples from an enviorement to analyze which litle bugs and bacteria are there you end up with an estimation. The reason? You obtain the DNA from all of them and then proceed to break it into small chunks at discrete places and those are sequenced. Then a piece of software tries to guess how all that fits, and barely achieves it most times...Now ad to that, that the fly has already diggested those